House of Lords Reform

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), who made a very good job of trying to describe something that, in the end, does not work. I fear that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, to whom I extend the hand of sympathy, has attempted to square a constitutional circle and retain two Houses at the same time, one partly elected and one composed of appointees for various reasons such as independence, expertise, ecclesiastical position and place in the legal system. In my view, his conclusion that the best solution is hybridity is flawed. It pains me to say that, because I agree with him so often. The problem with hybridity is that it is neither one thing nor the other. That is not the way in which we should look to the future of the country’s constitution, or to Parliament’s future operation. I signed an amendment—on which, apparently, we shall not have an opportunity to vote—supporting the principle of abolition of the House of Lords rather than its continuation in one form or another. I believe that there is a good symbolic argument for abolition, and, if we take the longer view, a good constitutional argument. I shall say more about that shortly; in the meantime, it is fair to say that the House of Commons is not in a fit state for us to abolish the House of Lords without making some reforms of the way in which we operate. In the White Paper on House of Lords reform, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House listed seven principles on which a reformed Chamber should be based. I shall concentrate on two of them. The first is the primacy of the House of Commons, and the second is that the House of Lords needs to be more legitimate. We have already had a fair amount of discussion of House of Commons primacy through interventions on the opening speeches, but I ask the House to imagine what it would be like if what my right hon. Friend proposes came to pass. We would have 270 elected peers, or whatever title we decided to give them. Presumably they would be elected on some kind of prospectus—dare I call it a manifesto? To an extent, both the right hon. Member for Maidenhead and my right hon. Friend dismissed the idea of a manifesto as an all-encompassing document. However, without a manifesto and without political parties, on what basis would we be asking people to decide who to vote for? What would be the programme that candidates stand for? What would they intend to do, if elected? We need manifestos, principles and policies so that people know exactly what would happen. Let us suppose that, quite against the wishes of this House, the people who stand for election to the House of Lords decide to stand on a manifesto, and let us suppose that the House of Lords that is elected—for 15 years in the first instance—is elected on a different manifesto from that on which the majority of the House of Commons has been elected. What will that produce? Will it produce agreement between the two Houses? I think not. What it will produce is an invitation to stasis—an invitation to the two Houses to lock horns and never be able to agree on anything.